Jane Jacobs Asserts That Art

Jane Jacobs asserts that art is an important component in structuring a city. How can art be incorporated? In various ways. Rather than straight girds, for instance, the city can be defined by winding streets mingled with streets that have dead ends, or by streets that seem to seemingly meander on forever.

Highlights can be another aspect -- some prominent focal points of the city that people are drawn to look at and that stand in key places.

Unifying aspects can also be used, where similar categories are grouped together thereby according a harmonious look. All of this lends interest and an aesthetic twinge to the dullest of cities and it is this way that art can be incorporated into city design.

As a point of example, Chicago, my chosen city, exemplifies Jacob's point perfectly. The streets are of all proportions with some long streets neighboring and intercepting of aborted ones.

Great care has gone into the architecture, specifically in order to inject some sort of art into an urban location. Highlights are grouped in focal points along the lake: Wrigley's stadium, the Fountain, the Art Museum, the Museum of Science and Technology, and all of Chicago's fascinating museums in their outstanding architecture grouped in specific spots close to or not far from the meandering lake. Interesting enough, its most famous university, North Western is too bestriding the lake, whilst the University of Chicago is close by. This may represent Jacob's third point of a unifying node where the Lake serves as hub of harmonization and integration.

Furthermore, Chicago is a city of contrast. Split into disparate ethnic parts such as China Town, a section characterized by Russians, one by Italians, another Jewish and so forth, the whole is yet united by its distinctive urban sprawl and carefully demarcated streets where deliberateness and apparent accident go into forming an integrated whole. A city per excellence, one yet receives an aesthetic tingle from one's visit to Chicago due to the fact that the design of the city has utilized the characteristics mentioned by Jacob into formulating its structure.

Rem Koolhaas paints the opposite picture in a poetic depiction of what he calls 'Junkspace'. Junkspace is the portrayal of a cacophonous, chaotic mess of nonsense shapes and haphazard urban design squeezed in and loaded onto each other, formless, and ill- or utterly undefined with different cultures and periods of history throttling one another and almost squeezing the other out of existence. Junkspace is the reverse of Jacob's picture of design and order. Here, there is no deliberate plan rather we have the post modernistic vision of urban society per excellence where cacophony and noise rules together with the different media bulletins and incidental urban garbage that has come to fill in the space, cracks, crannies, crevices, and all the nooks it can find in tight or wide areas.

Koolhas's junkspace certainly paints a perfect picture of certain parts of Chicago where undifferentiated ethnic sprawl leads slovenly onto another and then onto another, often without demarcations being drawn and suddenly one finds one walking or biking onto the promenade running alongside the lake or staring up at the skyscrapers that have been squeezed and twisted into tight corners and loom down onto the twisting, careening streets beneath.

Chicago is tight on parking space and many of its narrow streets are one-way traffic only reminiscent of Koolhaas's junkspace since they give us the idea that they were added only as an afterthought with reverse one-streets added as recompense later -- scattered some distance away. Chicago's streets also sprawl and circulate oftentimes without warning ending up in blind sports seeming only to confuse the unwitting pedestrian. And then, as always, there are parks squeezed next to dirty pubs, and roads with huge gaps between one and the adjoining one so that a driver has difficulty knowing which direction to take, with the forks being unclear; but at times there are the reverse too with one road knotting onto the next and only after one has crossed does the driver discover he has taken the wrong direction.